Was Michelangelo a better artist than Leonardo da Vinci?

What provoked a long-running spat between Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci,
two of the greatest artists of all time? Martin Gayford investigates

The Holy Family (The Doni Tondo). by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)Photo: Alamy

By Martin Gayford

7:00AM GMT 16 Nov 2013

One day, Leonardo da Vinci was passing through the Piazza Santa Trinita in Florence. Some gentlemen weredebating Dante in front of the Spini family palace. They called Leonardo over and asked him to explain the passage they were puzzling over, but just at that moment Michelangelo happened to come along and Leonardo instead suggested that the sculptor elucidate it.

This proposal annoyed Michelangelo. Instead of discoursing on Dante, he addressed Leonardo in the disrespectful "tu" form, and snapped back, "You explain it yourself, you who made the design of a horse to be cast in bronze, but who was unable to cast it." With that, he strode away, leaving Leonardo standing there, "made red in the face by his words".

Michelangelo had touched a sensitive spot. His rival's frequent failure to finish works – the horse in question was the gigantic monument Leonardo had begun in Milan – was due, he was alleging, to artistic deficiency. Leonardo couldn't do it.

It's not known exactly when this spat between two of the greatest artists of all time occurred; sometime around 1504 would be a reasonable guess. In that year Michelangelo's David was triumphantly installed in the centre of Florence, and the two artists were pitted against one another by the Florentine government, each under contract to paint an enormous mural for the great council chamber of the Palazzo Vecchio (none other than Niccolò Machiavelli seems to have had a hand in provoking tension between the painters). But that it did happen seems very likely. This and another incident in which Michelangelo needled Leonardo were recorded many years later by an anonymous Florentine chronicler. However as Charles Nicholl, Leonardo's biographer, has pointed out, the report seems to be based on an eyewitness account. It is extremely plausible.

Michelangelo's progress was triumphant. By the time he was 31 – in 1506, shortly after that row – he was described in an official letter sent by the Florentine government as "the greatest artist in Italy and perhaps the world". From that point, his prestige only rose. Towards the end of his life, many people – including his friend, the painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari – considered him the greatest artist who had ever lived. Right to the end, however, his career was fired, and darkened, by bitter, personal rivalry with other artists.

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Competition is an underestimated factor in the history of art. Critics tend to talk in milder terms of influence, shared styles and social factors. Between artists in the 15th and 16th centuries, however, the contests could be visceral and deadly. Vasari believed that this was the case between Leonardo and Michelangelo. Vasari believed that there was "the greatest disdain" between those two supreme Florentine masters; and the enmity is, if anything, emphasised by the fact that in The Life of Michelangelo by his assistant Condivi, effectively an authorised biography, there is no mention of Leonardo whatsoever. There were events and people that the great man preferred to pass over in silence.

One of these subjects was his apprenticeship in his early teens to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. Michelangelo apparently did not wish it to be known that he had ever been trained by a man who was, to his mind, an outdated artist. His reason for erasing Leonardo from his curriculum vitae might have been similar.

There are hints that before they were foes they had been on much better terms. Michelangelo picked up some of Leonardo's ways of drawing, which implies he might have been in the other man's workshop and been allowed to inspect his works in progress. On a list of Leonardo's books there is a Latin grammar by an obscure teacher named Francesco da Urbino – who happened to have been Michelangelo's school master. This could, of course, be a coincidence, but that two of the surviving handful of references to this obscure man should concern two major artists, suggests that it was not. It hints at a recommendation by Michelangelo, perhaps even a gift.

Michelangelo and Leonardo were too different, both as artists and men, to remain on friendly terms long. Leonardo was handsome, urbane, eloquent and dandyishly well dressed. In contrast, Michelangelo was neurotically secretive; he had a badly broken nose and extremely sharp tongue. Leonardo was by no means the only older fellow artist he insulted. According to Vasari, Michelangelo called Perugino a "fool in art" to his face (the older painter tried to take legal action for defamation but was laughed out of court).

Sexually, both were strongly attracted to younger men, but Leonardo seems to have been quite relaxed about this, while Michelangelo was agonised. Artistically, Leonardo was an obsessive observer of the natural world; Michelangelo fiercely concentrated on the representation of the naked male body with the maximum anatomical expressiveness. Leonardo, at least in the privacy of his notebooks, had his revenge when he addressed an "anatomical painter" – presumably Michelangelo – not to make his figures too gnarled with muscles, lest they resemble a "sack of walnuts".

Leonardo was not Michelangelo's only bitter rival. For years, he was engaged in an artistic duel with Raphael, and – unlike his battle with Leonardo – this was one that in the eyes of many contemporaries and powerful patrons, he lost.

Raphael's study of Heraclitus in 'The School of Athens' is thought to have been modeled on Michelangelo (Alamy)

Raphael (1483–1520) was a younger man, a brilliant assimilator and synthesiser of what had come before. He incorporated into his own elegant manner many of the innovations of both Leonardo and Michelangelo – which gives partial justification to the latter's savage posthumous judgment on Raphael: "Everything he knew in art he learnt from me."

Raphael was charming and graceful in appearance, just like Leonardo. He too may have begun as a friend, but if so suspicion kicked in fast. As early as 1506, Michelangelo was writing home to his father asking him to hide a certain Madonna away – probably the Bruges Madonna. Perhaps it was from Raphael's eyes that he wanted it hid.

Hardly had Michelangelo begun to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1508, when Raphael also arrived in Rome and began to win golden opinions for his paintings in the papal apartments. Such was the younger artist's kudos, that when the first part of the Sistine ceiling was unveiled in 1510, one ambassador reported that it was Raphael who had painted it (a view that, if Michelangelo heard it, must have made him gnash his teeth with fury).

When Michelangelo's ceiling was finished at the end of 1512, it must have been apparent to all that it was a supreme masterpiece. None the less, it was Raphael who was hugely favoured by the new pope, Leo X, elected at the beginning of the following year. Indeed, under Leo, Raphael became artistic dictator of Rome, scooping up all the best commissions – including the one to design the tapestries for the Sistine Chapel. The sulphurous envy felt by Michelangelo and his ally, the Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo, can be felt in their correspondence.

Had Raphael not died suddenly in 1520, he might well have continued to eclipse Michelangelo. There was, in the view of contemporaries, a hedgehog–and–fox contrast between the two.

Michelangelo did one thing supremely well: the heroic nude body, in stone or paint. Raphael, on the other hand could depict many things – landscapes, beautiful girls, misty perspectives, with most of which Michelangelo did not stoop to bother. The contrast between their treatments of the human body was summed up by one 16th–century critic in the observation that Raphael painted gentlemen, whereas Michelangelo made images of porters (that is, figures whose mighty musculature could only have come from ignoble heavy labour).

That is not how we see the comparison between the two today, but in the age of academic classicism it was received opinion that Raphael was the greater artist. That was how Joshua Reynolds, writing in the late 18th century, saw it. It was the Romantic age that rediscovered the majestic force of Michelangelo's art.

Raphael was Michelangelo's most dangerous rival, but artistic contests continued throughout Michelangelo's life. Venetians tended, understandably, to consider Titian the greatest of painters.

Vasari relates a wonderfully bitchy remark made to him by Michelangelo after visiting Titian's studio. To Titian's face, of course, Vasari and Michelangelo praised his work. After leaving, Michelangelo commented on what a great painter Titian would have been if only he had been taught to draw properly. In his seventies and eighties, Michelangelo was pursued by a now–forgotten figure named Nanni di Baccio Bigio, who wanted to replace him as architect of St Peter's, and loudly, unavailingly complained that the great man was senile, incompetent and knew nothing of architecture.

Conflicts between powerful egos were a part of 16th century artistic life – as they still are today. But they are not merely colourful. The art critic Rona Goffen has pointed out that the effort to outdo rivals was one of the engines that drove Renaissance art forward. For much of his life, Michelangelo was the man other artists strove to beat, while he himself not only took on all comers but attempted to defeat the great sculptors of classical Greece and Rome.

In The Third Man, Harry Lime remarks that the product of centuries of Swiss peace and prosperity was the cuckoo clock, whereas out of endless warfare in Italy came the Renaissance. He forgot Einstein and Klee, but it is certainly true that much great art came out of fierce Renaissance rivalry.